Malcolm R. Campbell's Blog, page 112
February 9, 2020
The usual Sunday potpourri
My novel Conjure Woman’s Cat will be among those listed on TaleFlick this coming week. According to their web site, “TaleFlick Discovery is a weekly contest that allows the public to vote on which stories they want to see adapted to the screen. Fans can now be involved earlier in the filmmaking process than ever before.” Personally, if Conjure Woman’s Cat became a movie, I’d like to see Viola Davis in the lead role of Eulalie–not that anyone would ask me for casting advice.
[image error]In spite of my criticism about the amount of backstory in Cemetery Road, I enjoyed reading the novel. The small-town alliances and secrets make for a very complex story that’s even hard for a man returning to his old hometown to figure out. Suffice it to say, there is great depth in the characters and enough lies to cover almost everything that happens.
I’m actually writing again, at work on a novel that might be considered a sequel of sorts to the three Florida Folk Magic novels set in the Florida Panhandle in the 1950s. It’s fun while I’m writing and frustrating while I’m researching the specifics from hospital care and to dishwashing soap promotions of the era.
[image error]My website will expire on the 20th of this month. I’m sad to see it go, but it’s no longer financially viable. I’ve deleted most of the information on it, leaving a home page with links to my writing. I’m happy to say that a fair number of people visited this site every month. Thank you.
My eyes are starting to glaze over about the American Dirt controversy. I see most of the complaints about the novel as a spurious tempest in a teapot.
February 8, 2020
I know Facebook and website gurus are just trying to help, but. . .
Facebook constantly leans on me to add more information to my author’s page. Among other things, they want a street address, a map, office hours, and a phone number. I can’t convince them that authors write from their houses and apartments and sure as hell don’t want anyone calling or stopping by.
[image error]I hear similar exhortations from website gurus: “If you don’t have a map showing directions to your place of business, prospective customers won’t take your company seriously.”
For one thing, an author is not a company. For another, do these gurus every look at authors’ websites and see them as no different than hardware stores? Or, are the guru’s really clueless, thinking (I guess) that authors should display addresses, maps, and sets of directions to help readers find their houses?
I just checked Madonna’s website. Her store is on line. My “stores” are bookstores since, like most authors, I don’t have a fulfilment center in the basement (partly because I don’t have a basement), much less a storefront. A lot of people around here sell produce from stands out in front of their houses, but I’m not sure that a “Boiled peanuts, okra, and books” approach would be worth the time.
Noticeably, Madonna doesn’t have a map on her website showing me how to get to her house.
My suggestion–though nobody sought it–is that Facebook and all those website gurus figure out how authors’ pages and sites work instead of advising us to do what is, frankly, stupid. An old joke comes to mind: “Question: What’s an expert.” “Answer: a (has been) drip under pressure.”
Meanwhile, I’m getting urgent messages from my website provider: “Crikey, Malcolm, haven’t you noticed that your whole website’s going down the toilet on February 20th?” I guess the powers that be haven’t noticed that I’ve deleted everything except for a boilerplate home page with alternative URLs for information about my books.
There’s plenty of room for a map to the nearest B&N store. Maybe that will get people off my back.
February 7, 2020
Oscar Nominations Prove That Hollywood Still Hasn’t Waked Up and Smelled the Coffee
Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” appealed to a dangerous brand of white, male nostalgia that evoked a mythologized time that was good for them and no one else. The 2020 Oscar nominations are an embarrassingly transparent primal scream by the Hollywood establishment hearkening back to the same.
Source: The 2020 Oscar Nominations Prove That Hollywood Still Hasn’t Seen Through the Smoke | Literary Hub
For several years now, acerbic pundits–including hosts and others of the televised Academy Awards ceremony–have said that the Oscars are really the “White People’s Movie Awards.” We’re also hearing that the awards are quickly becoming irrelevant because they don’t reflect population trends or attempts by various politicians and groups at greater diversity in all areas of the country, including publishing and filmmaking.
At present, whites (other than Hispanic whites) make up 73% of the U.S. population, while African Americans are at 12.7% and Hispanics are at 16.6%. We read that by 2044, the majority race in the U. S. will no longer be white. This is the reality. Some say that minorities should be represented (in various fields) to an extent larger than their percentage of the population due to long-time discrimination. (That’s a discussion for another kind of blog.)
It would be kind of petty for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to establish a policy that 12.7% of its nominations must be African American and 16.6% must be Hispanic. Needless to say–and this is perhaps debatable–nominations are based on merit rather than race or gender. It’s easy to see, though, that the nominations are skewed toward the traditional mainstream white (or WASP) idea of America.
We can and should do better.
February 5, 2020
Backstory adds depth while slowing down the primary action
Greg Iles Cemetery Road is a compelling thriller; I’ll stipulate that’s an early opinion inasmuch as I haven’t reached the half-way point yet.
[image error]The protagonist, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Marshall McEwan, returns to the small town where he grew up because his father is in ill health and his newspaper business is failing. (I would have used a different name since this one is too close to Marshall McLuhan, the famous media expert and philosopher). Marshall’s old friend is murdered and thus begins the current-day primary plot of the novel.
Having lived in a small town, I understand what Iles is doing when he shows how interconnected people are, including those who leave for the big city and then return. There are many kinds of loyalties and associations (including a former love interest) that make solving the murder about as tricky and running through a minefield.
The book has great depth in the development of its characters and is a page-turner when Marshall and others are up against entrenched and hostile movers and shakers who consider that murder to be a benefit to their business interests. The problems begin when the backstory segments get too lengthy; for example, Marshall was a reporter in Iraq, embedded with a group run by another long-time friend. But, my view is that when a description of what happened in Iraq runs to 16 pages, the backstory has run amok.
Suddenly, we’re in a different novel while the main story is put on hold. I think the Iraq relationship of two primary characters could have been explained in several paragraphs rather than taking us on such a long diversion. And, this is not the only time such a diversion happens. My cynical side says that without these diversions, the story would be pretty slim if it stuck to solving the murder.
I don’t know how things end up, of course. So, isn’t a review, but an an example of the problems of using too much backstory.
February 4, 2020
Do you read the acknowledgements sections of novels
[image error]I skip the acknowledgement section unless I’m reading a book that posits an alternative history or a modern take on a real history because I want to know what parts of such books are true. Otherwise, acknowledgements seem like sucking up:
A big thank you to my wife who decided not to divorce me when she discovered this book was likely to make us rich.
No greater editorial team exists that can top Tom, Julie, Wes, Jim, and Sandra at BIG ASS PUBLISHERS, LTD. Without them, I’d still be selling used cemetery plots.
A special thanks to the intensely personal help of the girls at Nevada’s Rising Sin Gentlemen’s Club who showed me the ins and out of selling sex.
Bob and Mary, if you’re still married when this book is published, thank you for taking me into your home and showing me your illegal gun collection. Wow, we could launch a revolution. I’ve changed your names here so the FEDS won’t be able to find you.
Frankly, I don’t want to read all this smarmy stuff. I guess it’s there only for one’s spouse, Tom, Julie, Wes, Jim, Sandra, Bob, Mary, and the ladies of the evening at one’s writer’s get-a-way location.
On the other hand, I’m intrigued by short and sweet:
For Zeke, who knows where all the bodies are buried.
For Emily, who only cheated on her husband once during the Vermont Writer’s Conference last year (Thanks for last night.)
For my wife (who still thinks my pseudonym is “Stephen King”).
Now those are the kinds of sentiments that tempt me to look for more of an author’s books.
How about you. Do you read the acknowledgements?
–Malcolm
I’ve added a spotlight page to this blog. I invite you to stop by and take a look.
February 3, 2020
Be careful where you say you’re from on Facebook
I no longer list Berkeley, California as the place where I’m from on Facebook because in “debates,” people say, “well, of course, Malcolm would say that, look where he’s from. We don’t need him telling people in Georgia what to think.”
[image error] I was born at Alta Bates Hospital, but don’t tell anyone.
My family is basically from California, with my late relatives living in Berkeley, Los Gatos, Santa Cruz, and Palo Alto. I think I was in high school (in Florida) when my father told me he could never go back because the farms and orchards had all been ploughed up and turned into developments, the places Pete Seeger said were houses like little boxes all made of ticky tacky and just the same.
I can’t go back either. For one thing, I can’t afford it. For another, I think the state has lost its connection to reality, a connection that always was fairly tenous on a good day. Sorry, folks, but I really can’t support a state that says illegal immigrants should have a right to vote.
So, in these Facebook “debates,” I suppose people thought I support all the lunacy associated with California these days. During the Vietnam War protest era, I was part of that lunacy because (a) I hated the war, and (b) had an apartment in San Francisco’s Mission District while my ship was in port across the Bay and had trouble anywhere I went in a Navy uniform.
When I was told on Facebook that “they” (the people in the thread) didn’t need a person from a crazy state telling people in the South that he (meaning me) thought the state and federal governments had no right to legislate or otherwise mess up women’s health care, including the right to an abortion, I said, “ladies, I’ve lived in the South longer than anyone else commenting on this thread.”
Huh? I said that I grew up in Florida from the first grade to college and now live in Georgia where my wife was born. We live on a farm that’s been in her family for five generations. They were surprised. They were happy to see that I had changed the town where I’m from to Tallahassee, Florida, and appreciated the fact that I like boiled peanuts, collard greens, mullet, grits, and cathead biscuits.
However, according to their assessment, a California birth certificate meant that even if you left the state at an early age, you were more or less the devil’s spawn and couldn’t possibly go to enough church services to get even with the Lord. If not that, then I was probably dropped on my head in the hospital.
So there it was. Clearly, my identification with California was an albatross around my neck. In the old days (whatever that means) people said Florida really wasn’t truly Southern. My response was that North Florida was/is about as Southern as you can get and that unlike other states in the Confederacy, “we” weren’t conquered by the North during the Civil War. Okay, so we’re overrun by snowbirds every year and from Live Oak to Miami, the state’s been pretty much ruined by developers who’ve paved over everything there that used to be good and created endless sprawl.
But, I digress.
On the minus side, now that I’ve changed my Facebook hometown to Tallahassee, everyone thinks I’m a racist. When they push that view too hard, I mention that the biggest race riots in the country all happened outside the South.
Is there a safe place out there I can claim as my hometown?
[image error]Malcolm R. Campbell has written a bunch of novels set in the South, or partly in the South, including the Florida Folk Magic Trilogy.
February 2, 2020
Research can be frustrating
Long-time followers of this blog know that it puzzles me when I watch a movie set in a certain year and see a lot of products used as background props how the set decorators knew that the products they showed were actually available in in the year when the story happened.
[image error]When I research the kinds of products that were in used during, say, the time-period of “Little House on the Prairie” (which had a general store), I wonder how the film crew verified what products they could show and what products they couldn’t show. Many product availability dates are obscure, given in terms of decade rather than specific year.
If you’ve been around for a while, you may remember that Duz laundry detergent gave away one item of Golden Wheat dinnerware in each box. But what year did they start doing that? Most sites say the 1950s. Others, the late 1950s. Neither Proctor & Gamble (who made Duz) nor Homer Laughlin (the company that made the China) mention the promotion.
There are a few blogs out there discussing the China (which has become a collectable) and how much fun it was to find it in the soapboxes. They don’t mention when the promotion started either. Neither do sites showing vintage Duz ads. I remember these kinds of promotions from when I was a kid: cereals, gas stations, and almost everyone else seemed to be giving away stuff. But, it’s not like I kept a diary that noted what day we got our first free drinking glass from an AMOCO or Gulf service station.
I have a feeling this Duz promotion began after the year in which my novel-in-progress is set. Nonetheless, I want to know what year the promotion began so that I can confess in the author’s note that I fudged it a few years.
[image error]Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of “The Sun Singer.”
February 1, 2020
Transitions
[image error] When I’m playing hookey from my writing, I read a lot. I roar through books at the rate of one or two a week. I re-read many of my books and have found myself transitioning over to non-fiction a lot of the time for a change of pace. This week, it’s Jeff Shaara’s Rise to Rebellion that focuses on the events leading up to the revolutionary war. I wish I’d had his well-researched novels in history class since I’ve learned more from them than I did in the classroom. I met Jeff when he was a teenager, though he wouldn’t remember me since I was one of his father Michael’s many students who came to the house once a week for our college creative writing class.
[image error] I link some of my books (in promotions, etc.) to IndieBound as a book-store friendly alternative to Amazon. Now I’m linking my books to Bookshop.org as well because it supports bookstores rather than supporting the Amazon near-monopoly. All of my books are there since the hardcover copies are printed by Ingram.
[image error] My wife and I watch a fair number of noir movies on the TMC (Turner Classic Movies) channel. One of my favorites (it’s hard to choose) is the 1975 version of “Farewell, My Lovely” (from Raymond Chandler’s novel) starring Robert Mitchum as Phillip Marlowe. (Wikipedia notes that Mitchum was the only actor who portrayed Marlowe more than once.) As always, I like the deadpan voice-over dialogue of noir movies along with the gloomy cinematography and the plots filled with down-and-out people. This movie is usually referred to as neo-noir since it wasn’t made during the 1940s/1950s noir period. However, the movie was set in 1941, and the cast, director, and photographers get everything right and was a nice change of pace from the films on Netflix.
[image error]Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of the three-volume Florida Folk Magic series that begins with “Conjure Woman’s Cat.” (Click on the book graphic to see what’s its Bookshop listing looks like.)
January 30, 2020
For discussion: do you support this view of publishing and writing?
from PEN America
PEN AMERICA RESPONDS TO ‘AMERICAN DIRT’ CONTROVERSY
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 29, 2020
(New York, NY) – Following news that the publisher of American Dirt plans to cancel its book tour, PEN America issued the following statement:“We have been closely following the debate concerning American Dirt, which implicates concerns at the heart of PEN America’s mission. Our organization has long been committed to the vital work of amplifying lesser-heard voices, and we are staunch advocates of increased diversity, equity, and inclusion in publishing. In our public programming, we strive to present the broadest array of writers from across the country and around the world. We have dedicated programs focused on fostering writing among individuals who are incarcerated, undocumented immigrant youth, and others who might be locked out of the literary community due to resources, background, or other factors. And we have engaged deeply over the last two years in combating online harassment, and recognize its particular silencing impact on women writers and writers of color.“As writers, we believe in the necessity of reasoned discourse across differences. The breadth of passionate perspectives unleashed by this controversy has sparked an overdue public conversation. We urge that this dialogue unfold in the realm of ideas and opinions, and avoid descending into either ad hominem attacks or caricature. As defenders of freedom of expression, we categorically reject rigid rules about who has the right to tell which stories. We see no contradiction between that position and the need for the publishing industry to urgently address its own chronic shortcomings. If the fury over this book can catalyze concrete change in how books are sourced, edited, and promoted, it will have achieved something important. It is past time to equip, resource, and elevate a wider group of voices to speak for themselves and about their experiences. As a nearly 100-year-old organization, we have our own historic legacies, blind spots, and challenges to reckon with. We look at this debate through the lens of how we can continue to evolve to better fulfill our mission.
“Finally, we reject all threats of violence, as well as vitriol aimed to shut down discussion and enforce silence. In our digital discourse, harsh invective too easily gives way to threats and intimidation that have a chilling effect not only on their targets, but on entire topics or points of view. We believe such approaches impair, rather than advance, what is an urgent and essential debate.”
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If you haven’t been following the “American Dirt” controversy, you can find information here.
January 28, 2020
Review: ‘Iron House’ by John Hart
Iron House by John Hart
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
John Hart’s books are among the darkest I’ve read, and “Iron House” is no exception. The story begins with an orphanage where the amenities are few, care and supervision is lapse, and groups of bullies rule the corridors and terrorize the weaker children. The darkness doesn’t begin or end here. The story features an assortment of characters nobody will like, the cruel upbringings where they were reared, and the violent lives many of them wore like armor in order to survive.
Michael has lived on the streets of New York as part of an organized crime organization that is feared above all others. When he falls in love with Elena, he wants a fresh start. However, his “colleagues” don’t want him to have any rest other than a grave. Michael is efficient, practical, and savvy, but as the plot turns in on itself with dark secrets falling like dominoes, he may not be strong enough to solve the mysteries that stand between him and saving those he loves–including Elena.
I’ve given the book four stars because I think some of the descriptions of violence and torture are excessive. However, those scenes do show the total inhumanity and animal nature of the bad guys, so they’re not totally out of place in the novel. The novel has two strong points in addition to the strong characters. First, it keeps the reader guessing because the mysteries and secrets get deeper and darker as the complex plot unfolds; second, the main characters, Michael, Elena, and Michael’s long-lost brother Julien are always at risk–and with each breath of air, the risk becomes greater as the story proceeds.
The novel shows the worst of human nature on many fronts–and perhaps the often misguided best.
Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of “Conjure Woman’s Cat,” “Eulalie and Washerwoman,” “Lena,” “Special Investigative Reporter,” and “Sarabande,” all of which you can find on Bookshop.org.
